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Dessert

Maple Sugar Candy

A hard candy made from maple sugar, cream of tartar, and water, boiled and cooled on buttered pans.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Maple Sugar Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Break up the maple sugar.

  2. In a pot, combine the sugar, cream of tartar, and water.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Add 1 tablespoon of cold water when it boils.

Skim the syrup

  1. Remove from heat and skim off impurities.

  2. Repeat skimming until no impurities rise.

Cook and shape

  1. Boil until the mixture hardens in cold water.

  2. Pour onto buttered pans to cool.

  3. When partly cool, pull the candy like molasses candy until light and crisp.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Maple sugar
Provides the sweetness and maple flavor and forms the body of the candy.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that helps keep the sugar from crystallizing, for a smoother texture.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can cook evenly into a syrup.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture hardens in cold water. The final boiling temperature sets the candy's texture. Stopping early leaves it soft and sticky, while going too far makes it brittle or scorched.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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